so interested in me, anyway? One second you’re charming, the next you’re belittling my means.”
Tom’s belly laugh burst the tension in the room. “When was the last time you got to talk to someone like that?”
“I do it in my head all day long. Just this afternoon I was going to—” Jane caught herself and looked down. Quieter, she said, “You shouldn’t indulge me so, sir.”
“You’re the most interesting woman I’ve ever laid eyes on.”
“That’s a lie,” she whipped back thoughtlessly.
“Never!” he said, placing a hand over his breastbone as if wounded.
Then she laughed, too, loud, and like she meant it—not the tinkling demure giggle from before—for the first time since she met him, and his eyes lit from within.
Jane swallowed and said suddenly, “Is there a washroom I can—please? Until my order—until Mrs. Toppan’s…please, where is your, um?”
Tom came around the counter and led her down the hall away from the entrance and stood again, too close for her to pass without her arm touching the buttons on his vest.
“It’s a very nice water closet,” he said, and she noticed his awkwardness. “I’ll…I’ll check on your order now.”
In the bathroom there was a lit candle on the sink by the basin. After she urinated, she tore a sheet from the Sears catalog on the hook by the stool. She read it. An advertisement for some white kid gloves she would never use or afford. She wiped, she stood, and she turned and pulled the string. There was no hip bath in the room, no foot bath, just a basin to which she turned. She splashed cold water on her face from the basin and rinsed her hands, but she did not notice that her mind was not racing as it should have been at the late hour, at being unsupervised, in private, with a man who was nearly a stranger, at what Auntie was thinking about her whereabouts and when she might send a neighbor out after her. She was calm. She was warm. When she opened the door, Tom stood just outside it, wringing his hands. Jane looked at him with confusion.
“It’s a nice water closet, isn’t it?” he repeated.
Jane tipped her head a little and gave a tiny laugh. “Yes…what? Do you want to see it?” she joked, stepping aside as he had done for her twice.
In two paces, Tom was in the bathroom with her, pressing her into the wall. His hands framed her face and his mouth was strong on hers. It took only a moment for Jane’s surprise to yield and for her own hands to run up his back as if she had been doing this her whole life, his breath heating her face, him lifting her heavy skirts and crinoline to feel her beneath them. Jane felt a rush of embarrassment at not having a cage crinoline as he must have expected, but then she realized he must not have expected it, or did not care she was without it. His mouth trailed under her jaw, and with a savage rip the tiny bone buttons at her collar scattered throughout the room. Before they had come to rest in their sprawl, with his face buried in her neck and chest, Tom pulled the pin from her hair and her braid unraveled, strands floating cloudlike and unmoored around them.
“Magnolia,” Tom murmured into her ear. He spun her facing away from him and said then, “Honora.” As one palm flattened on the faded bodice of her dress and the other found its place between the separate legs of her drawers, her memory flashed back to the Boston Female Asylum, at telling stories on the stairs, at the children rapt at her voice.
Both groaned. His hand moved up over her breasts, under her chin, and then grabbed a fist of her hair and bent her forward over the sink. She gripped the edges of the table and felt him fumble away from her, then a stark white moment of anticipation as she stared into the rippling water in the basin before her as he angled himself and slid into her stinging and hot and thick. Jane muffled the sound of her pain until it passed and then she moved against him. He swore and muttered unintelligible exclamations, grasping for her thigh or shoulder and then seizing, shaking, and trembling behind her.
She released her grip and tried to calm her own breath. “Honora.” She cut her eyes back at him and he withdrew. The air was too much when it rushed in, and she inhaled sharply. “Ah,” he winced, and said, “You’re bleeding, my dear,” in a low whimsical tone. Tom moved her around to face him. He noticed that she leaned away from him, over the sink, backward. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“You didn’t,” she said, turning up the corners of her mouth. “I mean, I’m fine. That’s normal. Right?”
“No,” he said, “it’s not normal. I’ve hurt you.”
“It’s not normal to bleed the first time?”
“Oh, the first time, sure, but—” he stopped cold and his face fell. Honora watched him and he could not tell what she felt. “I had no idea. I would have been kinder had you told me. I never would have thought—”
“Why would you have assumed otherwise?”
“Look at you! You must have men waiting in queue! And to waste that time on something as rushed and someone as base as me, I’m sorry.”
“Oh,” she said, as though insulted but not willing to show its effects unless the offender was asking. She prepared herself to wait through another length of awkward pause but Tom kissed her again, and apologized for ripping the buttons on her collar as he gathered them from the floor. He put them in her hand, and in a moment she pinned closed the bodice of her dress, though Tom asked her to wait. She gave him a patronizing smile and continued dressing herself.
“You don’t need to spin this tale for me, sir,” Jane said as she twisted the cloud of her hair onto the crown of her head. “I misunderstood before, but I don’t anymore. I’ll make my way home as soon as I gather the order.”
“It’s not a tale!” he insisted.
“Of course. But you don’t have to entertain me this way anymore. I understand the situation now.”
“What situation? I’m not trying to trick you! I said you were the most interesting and beautiful woman I’ve ever met, and I meant it.”
Jane clucked her tongue in disbelief and said, “Oh really? What do you plan to do about it?”
Tom laughed aloud. “I love it when you confront me! First I’ll take you home—”
“No, you won’t. Auntie will see your carriage and I’ll have God knows what punishment to deal with on top of these window dressings.”
“Listen to me. I will. I’ll go around the back street and you can walk through the neighbors’ yard. First I’ll take you home, and then I plan to save for a ring and convince you to marry me.”
Because he did the first part of what he said, drove her home, talked idly of when he would come to court her and when he thought he would be able to ask formally, she believed the rest, too. After all, she had really nothing else to believe in. People in middle age believe young love weak because of its ignorance, but the first love is the strongest, and its simplicity forges its strength—it prevents the leaking in of any doubt. Young love is dangerous in its powers of devastation: without bad experience, one cannot judge to manage one’s expectations.
At the house, Jane climbed the stairs into her attic
